Government Operations committee  It was in June.

Government Operations committee  That's right.

Government Operations committee  No, it's not fair to say it's for this building per se, in part because we are...and Tim can speak to the details to a greater extent than I can. The program itself probably involves 10 or 15 individual projects to renovate buildings on the other side of Wellington Street to provide swing space in, for example, La Promenade Building on Sparks Street.

Government Operations committee  On this building per se? Can you answer that?

Government Operations committee  If you like, Madam Chair, we can commit to get you the data, because there's a risk that we'll get it mixed up otherwise.

Government Operations committee  What we're trying to do is establish plans in five-year periods, recognizing that restoring Parliament Hill is likely to be an ongoing project. Instead of conceiving it as a 20-year enormous project, we're trying to look at it in five-year chunks. The five-year period we're on now is focusing on the West Block renovation and the attendant renovation to swing space that we need to make in order to move people out of West Block—committee rooms, etc.

Government Operations committee  It's complicated governance, because of course the plan is largely determined by parliamentarians through consultative work that they do in deciding where they want to go. Public Works is a service provider to that. But because Parliament is Parliament and the Senate is separately constituted from the House of Commons, the governance is somewhat informal in nature and has to be so.

Government Operations committee  I'll let Tim get into the details because our funding arrangements can sometimes baffle me a bit. I should first of all point out that we're in the business of providing office accommodation. So we are the custodian for many office buildings, but other departments are custodians for special-purpose kinds of facilities.

Government Operations committee  We're trying to achieve something. It depends on whether you're talking about our real property reforms, procurement transformation, or IT shared services. They're not all the same story. I would say our transformation is easier to achieve in areas where we as a department are more in unique control of the transformation.

Government Operations committee  I think there's a natural tension between departments that may have been in charge of their own purchasing before. You can imagine a natural response when the rules change and they say, “No, we're going to be doing it for you on these commodities.” It's a human response, so some departments have reacted that way--not all, by any means.

Government Operations committee  Oh yes. You have relationships with them. You meet them at trade shows. Your defence people work with them in different settings, so--

Government Operations committee  --you have a pretty good idea, I think, of what your target is and you try to bargain harder than anybody else.

Government Operations committee  I guess you may never know for sure, because those negotiations are tightly held. You can try to get information out of other countries, for example. Usually you have good relationships with other middle countries or--

Government Operations committee  So you share information as much as you can and you bargain as hard as you can on every line item you're negotiating, and at the end of the day, you try to compare notes. And it's usually through hearsay that you hear you got a pretty good deal.

Government Operations committee  That's the feedback we got on that one.